“Looky here, Dear Diary.” He pressed his palms together prayerfully. “Our Father Who Art in Heaven, grant me something evidentiary and I’ll attend Mass next Sunday for the first time in You know how long.”

The clasp sprang free with a finger-tap. A pulse in his neck throbbed as he opened the book.

No diary notations, no prose of any sort. Three cardboard pages held photographs moored by clear plastic bands.

The first page was of a teenage Adriana Betts with a boy her age. Bubbly cursive read:

Dwayne and Me. Happy Times.

Dwayne Hightower had been a huge kid, easily six six, three hundred, with a side-of-beef upper body and thick, short, hairless limbs. His face was a pink pie under coppery curls, his smile wide and open as the prairie. He and Adriana had posed in front of hay bales, barns, a brick-faced building, and a green John Deere tractor with wheels as tall as Adriana. In each shot, Hightower’s heavy arm rested lightly on Adriana’s shoulder. Her head reached his elbow. She clung to his biceps.

Their smiles were a match in terms of innocence and wattage.

The following page began with more of the same but ended with shots from Dwayne Hightower’s funeral. Adriana in a black dress, her hair tied back severely. Wearing the cheap sunglasses from the wardrobe.

The final page was all group shots: Adriana and several other young adults in front of a red-brick church. The edifice that had backdropped her and Dwayne. Had they planned to wed there?

Not a single tattoo, body pierce, or edgy hairdo in sight. These pictures could’ve dated from the fifties. Heartland America, unaffected by fad or fashion.

In some of the shots, a portly white-haired man in his sixties wearing a suit and tie stood to the left of the group.

In most of the pictures, Adriana, though not particularly tall, had positioned herself at the back. Not so in the last three, where she posed front-center, next to the same person.

Young black woman with short, straightened hair and a heart-shaped face. Extremely pretty and graceful despite a drab smock that could’ve come out of Adriana’s closet.

A single chocolate dot in a sea of vanilla.

The bones in the park had yielded African American maternal DNA.

I didn’t need to say anything. Milo muttered, “Maybe.” Then he pointed to the older man in the suit. “Got to be the pastor, whatever his name is.”

“Reverend Goleman,” I said. “Life Tabernacle Church of the Fields.”

He turned to me. “You memorize everything?”

“Just what I think might be important.”

“You figured the church might be important? Why didn’t you say so?”

“There’s might and there’s is,” I said. “No lead before its time.”

“You and that party wine from when we were kids—the Orson Welles thing.”

“Paul Masson.”

“Now you’re showing off.”